The Best American Poetry

Are You Smarter than an Eighth Grader? by Stacey Harwood

Reading Amy Glynn Greacen's post yesterday about memorization reminded me of the pamphlet I picked up at a book sale a few years ago.  If you went to public school in New York City during the first half of the last century, you were required to memorize poems if you wanted to advance to the next grade:

Here's the table of contents from 1925:

I bet that if you approach a public school educated Octogenarian, he or she wouldn't hesitate to recite Invictus or Sea Fever or some other verse. One of my cherished memories is of sitting in a Washington, D.C. restaurant with David's mom Anne Lehman, when she was inspired to recite, in her native German, a Schiller poem that she had learned as a girl, before her world was turned upside down by certain unfortunate events that forced her out of her childhood home in Vienna, 1939.  David and I and the diners at the nearby tables were rapt and when she finished: applause. 

 When I was in the third grade, my friend Adina Bloch and I memorized Poe's "Annabel Lee" for show-and- tell.  Years later (many years), after hearing Robert Pinsky lecture about the value of memorization, I made a sustained effort to memorize Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey and I got pretty far into it though I abandoned the project when the same lines kept tripping me up. Was there a psychological reason I wonder, for this resistance to certain words or lines? 

One must make a commitment to memorize a beloved poem but to succeed means you will have it always, whenever you want or need, wherever you may be.  If you were updating those public school memorization requirements, which poems would you include?  Would you keep any of the poems from 1925?

-- sdh

Poets and Writers MFA Rankings: Garbage in Garbage Out by Stacey Harwood

If you do a "close" reading of the P&W methodology section you will see what shifting sand the ranking is based on (background on rankings is here). Most of what is in the methodology section would be more accurately placed in a separate section called "findings."  This distinction is important because by keeping the findings separate from the discussion of methodology the reader knows that the findings are just one person's interpretation of the data.

Most of the statistics derive from a single number, 640, the number of would-be applicants who visited a blog and responded to a poll by completing forms. Most of what the author says are "demographics" are poll responses.  The author does not provide demographics (such as age, gender, location, income, etc of the respondents).

The methodology says the responses are "votes" and that those programs receiving the most "votes" are the ones the respondents hold in highest esteem. Yet if you read elsewhere you learn that the "votes" are the programs to which respondents are applying; there may be no connection between which program one might hold in high esteem and those to which one individual is applying (eg. I may think Houston is the best but because I live and work and have family in NYC, it isn't practical for me so it's not on my list of programs I'll be applying to.  I may believe that Cornell has the best program yet I know the liklihood of getting in is slim so I'm not applying- these scenarios aren't captured in the ranking). Respondents were not asked to reveal which programs they hold in highest esteem; they were asked to disclose to which programs they would apply.

Every time the author says, "it is reasonable to assume," know that it is also reasonable to assume something other that what follows. Such claims are not backed up with any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise.

Most of the programs ranked got fewer than half the number of "votes" than the top ranked program - there are many many ways to account for this gap and yet the only explanation given is that it reflects the "esteem" with which potential applicants hold the program but it could reflect many other possibilities.

A good deal of the "methodology" section is devoted to history of MFAs and to discrediting other polls - irrelevant in a discussion of methodology.

I could go on. The infelicities of the writing style are too numerous to mention. Strip away all of this filler and you see how little substance there is to the ranking.

And there is more:  The author of the ranking methodology makes many unsupported claims.   None of these claims have anything to do with the method used to gather data for the so-called ranking. Here are but three examples from among many (my comments in bold):

 When programs are assessed by individuals already within the system, the natural result is that older programs—whatever their selectivity, financial resources, faculty resources, curriculum, pedagogy, or student outcomes—move to the top of the pack due to their profile advantage. Yet applicants report only limited interest in programs’ historical pedigrees, as pedigree itself is often considered a suspect quantity in the national literary arts community." (What is the basis for a sweeping statement about the national literary arts community's views of "pedigree"?)

Whereas scientific rankings (which require demographic data that is, in this case, unavailable both to independent researchers and national trade organizations) traditionally poll, at the state level, well less than a hundredth of one percent of their target population, and national polls typically sample well less than a thousandth of one percent, the sample size for the 2012 Poets & Writers Magazine rankings, in a nod to the necessarily unscientific nature of the polling, is between 2,000 and 20,000 times larger as a percentage of population. (Scientific polls use precise measures to identify and calculate sample size, which is why they don't have to rely on large numbers to get valid, replicable results.  The sample here is unreliable because the pollster has no control over who has responded to the poll and because the pollster has known biases.) 

In most instances, student scores are only lightly scrutinized (or simply ignored altogether) by the programs themselves, and instead reviewed—where they are reviewed—by individual universities’ Graduate Colleges, which often have minimum GRE-score requirements (typically very generous ones). Creative writing MFA applicants should not avoid the GRE General Test for fear of the Mathematics portion of the exam; even those programs that do give minor weight to standardized test scores in their admissions processes generally look only at applicants’ Verbal and Analytical Writing scores. (How does P&W know that applicants fear the mathematics portion of the GRE and how admissions offices value them?) 

 These inaccuracies, sweeping statements, and blatant falsehoods are buried in the excess verbiage that is characteristic of the author's writing. Strip the garbage away and you're left with . . . garbage. 

-- sdh

Shame on you Poets & Writers Magazine by Stacey Harwood

Once again, Poets and Writers Magazine has published creative writing MFA/Phd program rankings that are based on a poll of would-be applicants to such programs who visit a blog.  Clearly P&W doesn't let its ethics get in the way of perpetuating a scam to boost circulation. After three years of seeing these rankings gain traction, nearly 200 MFA/Phd-program teachers and administrators, led by Robert Pinsky, Leslie Epstein, and Erin Belieu, have lodged a protest, in the form of an open letter (reproduced here by Dan Nester) to P&W  that cites many of the same reasons for objecting to the rankings that we have noted here, here, and here since they were first published in 2009.

Here are a few of my thoughts on this mess: 

Poets & Writers has entrusted the task of the rankings to a blogger/poet who has no credentials as a research scientist and who is not disinterested in the outcome:  For each year of the rankings he has been enrolled in one of the programs that is being ranked.  This fact alone should disqualify him for the job. 

In attempting to shore up its phony methodology, P&W wastes a lot of ink on why other rankings fall short. This is like saying my poem is good because yours is bad. 

P&W is wrong to assert that a scientific ranking of MFA programs is not possible. A ranking is possible, though to construct it properly would require time, money, and commitment, resources that might be better spent elsewhere. The underlying data, if collected by a reputable research firm, under the auspices of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs and with the cooperation of its members, could establish a ranking that would give MFA/Phd applicants valuable information to guide their decisions about graduate programs. 

Many of the signatories to the open letter are affiliated with our most prestigious universities.  To lend more depth and credibility to their criticism, they should ask a member of a social science research department to review the ranking methodology and comment on its soundness.  A first-year graduate student could do this in an afternoon; the outcome would underscore the extent to which P& W is flouting its responsibility to its readers.  

The MFA programs should immediately pull their advertisements from P&W.  Why continue to support a publication that is so lacking in journalistic integrity? 

--sdh

The Corn Dude and Elaine Equi's Lesbian Corn (by Stacey Harwood)

Here in New York’s Finger Lakes, corn season arrives late and leaves early. If you're like me, when you spot the first ears at a farmers market or roadside stand, you go a little crazy.  Even though I’m usually cooking for just my husband and myself, I tend to buy dozens of ears at a time.  My favorite comes from Ed Fedorka (above, also known as "the corn dude"), of Rainbow Valley Ranch, because corn is all he sells.  Ed is living proof in my experience that if you make just one thing, you’re going to strive for perfection (think Antonio Stradivari). When corn comes in, Ed’s table at Ithaca's farmer's market is strewn with his super sweet varieties ($5/dozen); later in the season, he adds corn for popping packaged in neat plastic bags shaped like hands.

So what to do with this surfeit of corn? You eat it raw, you toss it in salads and pasta,  you add it to your cornbread mix.  And you experiment:

This season’s first corn coincided with a string of brutally hot days, days so hot that to boil water to cook the corn in my usual way would have made our un-airconditioned kitchen uninhabitable.  Instead, I soaked the ears, still in their husks, in the sink filled with water, and threw them on the covered grill for roughly 10 minutes.  The corn took on the smoke from the hardwood charcoal and was delicious, no butter or salt required.  Even so, we had five large ears left over from a meal that included grilled wild salmon (also in season), and a salad. 

The next day, with the temperatures holding steady in the 90s, I decided use the corn for a cold soup, nothing fancy.  I stripped the kernels into the blender, added the last of my garlic scapes along with salt and pepper and a fistful of fresh cilantro (stems and leaves).  After liquefying the corn, I streamed in about a cup of water, enough to thin the contents to the consistency of a pancake batter, and strained everything through a mesh sieve.  Once chilled, the resulting soup was the essence of corn, or as some might say,  the flavor of  Kansas in August.

Fresh corn always reminds me of this poem, by Elaine Equi:

Lesbian Corn

In summer
I strip away
your pale kimono.
Your tousled hair too,
comes off in my hands
leaving you
completely naked.
All ears and
tiny yellow teeth.

from Surface Tension (Coffee House Press, Sept 1989)

The Odyssey Project, Books IV - VI [by Emma Trelles]

 
 A Fantastic Cave Landscape, with Odysseus and Calypso (1568-1625), by Jan Brueghel the Elder 

Dear Stacey,

I've been slack in my letter writing because of work, which is, at the moment, attending to the sentences of others. I'm  sweeping clean the muddiness of poor word choices and useless repetition, employing the foot soldiers of concise writing: grammar and punctuation. It's tedious, but I also kind of dig it. It's a lot easier to fix someone else's mistakes.

But when the work seems insurmountable, I think about what else I'd rather be doing, or, to put it another way, what might be my own kind of Ithaka, "...the island of them all" - something that I greatly desire and whose attainment is continually delayed.  The promise of it keeps me going.

One of my Ithakas is riding my bicycle, a pearly white Raleigh that my husband gave me before we were  married. I love it so much that I instantly named it Pegasus, and soon after bought a bike bell, which I mostly ring just to hear its thick trill. It is searing hot in South Florida at the moment, the norm in late July, but when I'm on my bicycle the temperatures seem less oppressive, as does everything else, and I get to fly around town smelling the ocean and checking out the poincianas and palms and the little green parrots that like to nest and screech in both. I feel like the me that was once a 10 year old, skinny-legged girl explorer. And I suppose she too is another kind of Ithaka.

What I'm getting at is that even though I haven't been writing you, I have still been reading and thinking. Books IV-VI are my favorites so far. I like how the mundane tasks of servants are described in painterly fashion:

Here a maid tipped out water for their hands

from a golden pitcher into a silver bowl,

and set a polished table near at hand;

the larder mnistress with her tray of loaves

and savories came, dispensing all her best...

 

And also here:

"...but Helen called the maids

and sent them to make beds, with purple rugs

piled up, and sheets outspread, and fleecy

coverlets, in the porch inside the gate.

The girls went out with torches in their hands..."

 

Whether cooking, doing laundry, or making beds, no chore seems too mundane for Homer to depict with color and physical touch. Even scent is not overlooked, as when Eidothea, daughter of the god Proteus (and a nereid), dabs ambrosia beneath three lads' noses to drown out the "bestial odor" of the seal skins in which they hide. The ambrosia is likened to perfume, and, to me, the moment  hints at how man aligns himself with both the beautiful and the monstrous, how often the two can be experienced within breaths of one another.

 

"Eidothea," by Linda Carlson

I also admire the simple, fairytale connotations of these books' titles, such as "Sweet Nymph and Open Sea," although I don't recall Kalypso being so accomodating in other prose versions I've read of this same story. Perhaps I'm mixing it up with The Iliad? Somehow I remember Kalypso as a dangerous and seductive foil, and when I came across these lines describing her lair, I could see how Odysseus might be lulled into contentment, if even for a short while. 

Upon her hearthstone a great fire blazing

scented the farthest shores with cedar smoke

and smoke of thyme, and singing high and low

in her sweet voice, before her loom a-weaving,

she passed her golden shuttle to and fro.

A deep wood grew outside, with summer leaves

of alder and black poplar, pungent cypress.

Ornate birds here rested their stretched wings --

horned owls falcons, cormorants -- long tongued

beach combing birds, and followers of the sea.

Around the smoothwalled cave a crooking vine

held purple clusters under ply of green;

and four springs, bubbling up near one another

shallow and clear, took channels here and there

through beds of violets and tender parsley.

 

When I think about escaping my keyboard, it's usually to a green place like this, which I imagine as lit by candles and mirrors and old lamps. Once when I was in New Orleans, I spent quite some time in a store that devoted itself to that kind of light.  We had run in from the rain, and the contrast between the pale gray of the French Quarter and the jeweled glow of the shop was as precise as if invisible hands had placed each setting in its own frame, the former ensconced in a rectangle of simple pine and the latter in a baroque gold square.

Now I'm sitting here looking out the window, writing you, thinking about New Orleans and ignoring The Odyssey, and that poem by Donald Justice comes to mind, the one about how art casts its own light and how it can comfort us in our mortal, and thus temporary, sorrows.

I've always been easily distracted, finishing projects or cleaning the house in no particular order. Look, there is a cup on the balcony that needs washing.... let me clean the grime from this leaf.... this shelf of rags needs folding.... No one thing is started and finished in a continual surge.  And now I realize that I read that way too -- following a story, then drifting off into my own.

Yours, Emma

 

This just in from Todd Swift . . . Special event with Christopher Ricks, July 12, 2011,7:00 PM

Calling all Londoners:  Todd Swift, who runs the popular Oxfam reading series, writes from London to tell us about this upcoming event: 

Dear friends, just a reminder that we have an extraordinary evening of poetry lined-up for 12 July, 2011: Sir Christopher Ricks, one of the world's greatest living critics of English literature, and editor of the Oxford Book of English Poetry, and formed Oxford Professor of Poetry, will be reading his favourite poems and discussing them, as part of the Oxfam Bookfest, July 12, 7 pm, at 91 Marylebone High Street, London, W9. Tickets are £5 at the door, £3 concession. Be sure to reserve seats by Telephone ( 020 7487 3570) or email: oxfammarylebone@hotmail.com.

David posted a brief appreciation of Ricks here.  This should be a fantastic evening. 

-- sdh

The Odyssey Project, Books I - III [by Emma Trelles]

                      "Cayuga Lake, Ithaca NY," watercolor by Nari Mistry

 

Dear Stacey,

I am in receipt of your letter and will say I was pretty tickled when I saw the first mention of Ithaka in Homer's verse because I knew that you were reading it from your own Ithacan abode. I wrote "Stacey!" in the margins beside line 30 and then again alongside line 213:

Another thing --- this too I ought to know --0

is Ithaka new to you, or were you ever

a guest here in the old days? Far and near

friends knew this house; for he whose home it was

had much acquaintance in the world.

 

This is my serpentine way of saying, yes, it is very cool that you're reading The Odyssey from the Finger Lakes region. Is it also a coincidence, then, that Homer so often personifies dawn with "fingers"? There are fingers of "pink light" and "finger tips of rose," and I gather that there will be more mention of dawn's pretty grasp in the books to come. I think if you read some of them at daybreak, from Ithaca, you might dream of flying over water, "in a clap of wings," with eyes faded to the grey of Athena's.

I had not planned on quoting so much of what I've read thus far, but I had also not expected to encounter such music. The sound of it! Sometimes I read lines out loud just to hear the iambic pentameter or a spondee, or some combination of both ("My word, how mortals take the gods to task!"). I actually scanned some lines in pencil, although I have not attempted to do any such thing since Campbell McGrath assigned The Poem's Heartbeat many years ago in graduate school.

Good god, I was an awful scanner and have probably flubbed the above line now as well. But I wanted to share with you how Homer's long song has inspired me to listen, more carefully and with less judgement, not only to whatever words I find on a page but to the sounds around me: the rattle of a maintenance man's cart, footsteps in the hallway. A spare kind of music.  It is so quiet here as I write this to you from South Florida; even the mockingbirds have taken a break from their summer chatter.

Yours,

Emma

The Odyssey Project, Books I - III

Dear Emma, 

First of all, how cool is it that I'm reading The Odyssey while on vacation in Ithaca, NY?  Location location location.  And from where I sit, both Hector and Homer are within striking distance.  

Second, I don't know why I approached The Odyssey with such dread, as if reading it would be a chore, as if I were a rebellious eighth grader. It took a few pages to get used to the language and syntax, but overall this translation is rather plain spoken and easy to enter.  I wonder how one would find Pope's rhymed couplets. In any event, Fitzgerald's version is completely engaging, so much so that I may even race ahead of schedule.

I like knowing the outcome from the very beginning and given the way it's going, have a feeling that this will be a page-turner.  Such characters!  Athena the "grey-eyed goddess" who can assume so many forms. Without checking I count three: a visitor, Mentor, a sea hawk. Surely I'm leaving something out. She likes a man with good manners and loves Ullyses.  And Nestor is rich, with such great lines: "never have I seen the gods help any man / as openly as Athena did your father -- / well, as I say, if she cared for you that way, / there would be those to quit this marriage game."  One of my favorite passages is in Book III when Nestor stops Athena and Telemakhos from returning to their ship and says, essentially, "What am I, chopped liver? You think I'm like some pauper who can't put you up for a night?" 

So much more.  The Dawn spreads out "her finger tips of rose," the sea is always wine-dark (though I love "time to ride home on the sea's broad back"). There's fashion (Athena's "ambrosial, golden" sandals) and much feasting and drinking.  They sure love to fire up the grill and feed each other "crisped meat" doused in wine.  

On to Books IV-VI.

Yours, 

Stacey

Hot Topic, Hot Day, Cool Show: "A Taste of the Past" [by Stacey Harwood]

I was honored to be one of two guests today on Linda Pelaccio's Heritage Radio Network program "A Taste of the Past."  The show is broadcast live over the internet from a studio that adjoins Roberta's restaurant in Bushwick, Brooklyn.  Linda is a culinary historian and if you click through the archives of her show you'll be amazed by the scope and depth of her knowledge -- plus, she has a really sexy radio voice. Today's program explored cooking with and collecting cast-iron cookware.  We were joined by Joel Schiff, who has amassed a collection of roughly eight thousand pieces of cast-iron cookware (!!).  We had a lot of fun, and when the show was over we repaired to Roberta's to share a couple of outstanding pizzas.  

You can listen to today's program here.

-- sdh 

Much Depends on Dinner -- Making Chicken Stock with Stacey Harwood

     All human history attests
That happiness for man,—the hungry sinner!—
Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner.
     --  Lord Byron, Don Juan. Canto xiii. Stanza 99

Whenever I post to this series I wonder what my own contribution might be.  The answer came yesterday when I awoke to a forecast of cool weather and the words "chicken stock" popped into my brain. Chicken stock is something I’ve been making for years; it is the foundation for so many dishes, and making it always brings me spiritually closer to my ancestral roots.  Plus, a certain person in the household had developed a bad bad cold and how better to keep it from turning into “La grippe, La grippe, la post-nasal drip” than with a hot cup of broth?

The key to great chicken stock is of course the chicken.  Mine come from a farm in Pennsylvania, they’re free range, organic, etc. etc. but most importantly, they arrive with feet and head attached.  I whack these off and freeze them, along with the backs and necks. When my freezer drawer is full, it’s time to pull out the stock pot and get going. 

One could probably make a perfectly delicious stock with these chicken parts alone but I prefer to enrich mine with vegetables and aromatics.  Here, then, are my ingredients, most of which I picked up during a morning circumnavigation of the Union Square farmers market. Clockwise from top right:  chicken parts, carrots, thyme, cloves,parsley, peppercorn, ginger, salt, leeks, lovage, onion. The practice of adding a  knuckle-sized piece of ginger began circa 1990 and adds a bit of brightness though the flavor cannot be detected. I would ordinarily use celery but instead used lovage because, well, there it was at the market. Why not give it a try?

The first step, and this is something recommended by a celebrity chef whose name escapes me, is to rinse the chicken parts, put them in a pot, fill it with water, and bring it to a low boil.  Let it boil away for a few minutes while lots of scummy stuff, similar in appearance to what you might see trapped between rotting branches on the shoreline of a stagnant pool, rises to the surface (below left). Strain the chicken, discarding the cloudy water.  Wash the film of scum from the pot, return the chicken to it along with the remaining ingredients (below right) and fill with water. 

You can see that I've left the skin on the onion and everything else is chopped rather coarsely. This is all that's required because your stock will cook for a long time and you don't want the vegetables to disolve into mush and make it cloudy. 

Bring the filled pot to a simmer, and stand by for ten or fifteen minutes or so. ( If you turn your back, this might happen.)  More scum will rise to the surface and you must remove it with a fine mesh skimmer, repeating to yourself this mantra, revealed to me by a college boyfriend who later attended cooking school:  “Skim the scum with a skimmer then simmer, skim the scum with a skimmer than simmer, skim the scum with a skimmer then simmer.”